Business insight is the main focus of RightNow’s May 09 release. It added two major components, Cloud Monitor and Enterprise Analytics, to its cloud based CRM suite.  I have written about RightNow before (see for example, RightNow Nov 08 Release Focuses on Call Center Agent Support and Barack Obama’s Answer Center – Campaign CRM from RightNow). I recently spoke with RightNow’s David Vap on this latest release.

David said that companies are now using both traditional data mining of customer interactions and the newer Web monitoring of what is being said about their company and products on the Web outside of direct contact. RightNow is addressing both of these sources of customer insight and behavior.  Their Enterprise Analytics provides deep analysis on the internal data collected through direct customer interactions. Their Cloud Monitor listens to conversations occurring about an organization on the web. Here is an Enterprise Analytics screen.

Being a cloud service, one of RightNow’s product principles is minimized startup costs and time. They applied this to Enterprise Analytics by pre-building a lot of the features to avoid the traditional slow start up of a data mining implementation. At the same time, you can still customize this capability. It looks at traditional contact center data such as first time call resolution and response times and allows you to segment it by such factors as specific products. This enables you to see which products are requiring the most support, where and why. Enterprise Analytics allows you to pull data from a range of sources, not just what occurs in RightNow.  Here is a video demo of Enterprise Analytics.

To supplement what you hear directly in contact with your clients, RightNow’s Cloud Monitor tracks external conversations about products, services and brands, as they occur on the social Web. In the current release it tracks both Twitter and YouTube; support for other social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn is planned for the future.

The Cloud Monitor information is passed to company customer agents who can respond immediately through the channel where the mention occurred or a more formal customer ticket can be set up. With the latter case, the full power of RightNow’s CRM system comes into play to manage and track the response.  This not only helps to manage the response but the extensive CRM features helps to provide the response as best practices are still evolving. Here is a Cloud Monitor screen. 

They choose to start with Twitter and YouTube because most of the clients are very consumer centric, either in the private sector or in government. These two channels cover a lot of the conversations in this space. They built a core capability with plug-ins for these two channels so it will be easy to add more Web channels as they plan to do. The company agent sees a list of all current activity with post date, text, etc. RightNow also applies its SmartSense rating to determine of the mention was positive or negative.  They plan to add topic monitoring in the neat future to enable agents to see what topics are coming in conversations about the brand. Here is a video demo of Cloud Monitoring.

David also mentioned that with the May 09 release, RightNow is providing another social web related feature, called Cloud Links. While Cloud Monitor empowers your organization to be part of consumer conversations, Cloud Links helps you engage your customers in the social networking world. With Cloud Links you can include links to social network sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr in personalized surveys and outbound mailings created using RightNow Marketing and Feedback to spread the word about your organization and gain visibility to consumers that use these links.

I think these are all very useful features. I especially like the way you can combine Web monitoring with a full featured contact management system to respond to what is happening around your company in the Web and management and track the response process.